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Google Searches Used in Murder Trial?
mcrbids writes "Well, the details are a bit scant, but it seems that the content of Google searches were used to help establish intent in a murder trial. Will police in the future simply serve a subpoena to Google to find out what you've been thinking about? While this use of that information makes sense, at what point does your privacy give way to public concerns? Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches before you've been arrested for a crime, and what effect would this have on the health of society?"
> Will police in the future simply serve a subpoena to Google to find out what
> you've been thinking about?
How would Google know what someone has been thinking about?
we're talking about using web crawlers here, not personal information. that's what's been done. that's not a big deal
Will police subpoena google? No, because in this case, the
search history was recovered from the local hard drive.
Doesn't this fall in line with reviewing a persons library checkout history?
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Note to self: Remeber to clear browser cache before killing someone.
Thanks for the reminder slashdot!
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
If Google was able to index your publicly available content that just so happened to contain your intent to murder someone, damn right it should be used. If the content was not private, encrypted, password protected or otherwise hidden it's fair game.
The stated use (subpeonaing google for information on a person who has been arrested and they are building a case against) is perfectly reasonable, assuming they have reason to believe google would have useful evidence. That's what happens when you get arrested, they try to collect evidence to use against you from any source the can.
And of course, the slippery slope case presented in the intro copy would NOT be reasonable. If i am arrested for valid suspicion i would expect them to try to build a case against me. But, in a free society, it is not acceptable to have everything i do fed into a system which is flagging people as POTENTIAL criminals.
so: yes. and no.
lysergically yours
that a lot of bored people in the supposed privacy of their own home will search for a lot of crazy things that in 99.99% of cases they have no intention of carrying out.
Did the article say google provided the searches? More than likely they were stored in his search history on his own computer.
"Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches..."
Yes they should. I think that using a search engine to research methods of breaking someone's neck and water levels in nearby lakes is evidence that should be available to officers trying to find out who broke someone's neck and dumped them in a lake.
While this evidence alone is not enough to incriminate someone it does provide extra evidence to lead to their future incarcination. Lets face it, things add up and being able to find the pieces of a puzzle is an important part of researching a crime.
You can't arrest someone for looking at certain things but knowing they looked at those things is important in figuring out if they did commit a crime.
The information on the searches came from his browser history, not from Google.
...the guy just wanted the information in case it ever became useful.
This too shall pass.
*launches google*
*types "how to bomb white house"...*
**KNOCK KNOCK**
"Who's th....
Some employers already Google potential employees. Information available on you, through searches, is public information. Anyone can get it.
In this case, it looks more like they went through the guy's web caches on his computers. Assuming the computers were properly obtained, they're evidence. I don't see anything scary or privacy-killing here. Yes, the details are sketchy--but if he's on trial right now for a crime committed two years ago, it's pretty safe to say that he was arrested for the crime before they started looking for evidence.
As the saying goes..."Move along, nothing to see here."
This isn't new. Last year, I was a juror on a trial for various sex/computer crimes, and part of the evidence admitted were the search strings from Google in the IE history/cache. In the interest of keeping my lunch down, I'm not going to reprint some of the searches here. We'll just say that they're bad.
It's not that they're stupid. They're simply unaware of how the Internet works.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
I dont see why police shouldn't be allowed to search through your google history- or anything else on your computer for that matter, just provided that they have a warrant. It's no different from searching through your house or any of your personal belongings, which is perfectly fine provided that they have a warrant or reason to do so.
We will have to rename google to:
go:ogle
Need information to help with killing your wife? Choose Altavista, the Cops would never think to ask us!
Visit altavista.com and search "Snap Neck"
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
What this guy did was about as dumb as buying books/magazines/journals on these subjects, and then having sticky bookmarks on all this kind of info when the police search your home. Not that different from the countless individuals who get caught with child porn because they forget, or simply don't know how, to clean our their caches and histories.
If he had been using Safari on OS X, he could have been in "Private" mode and avoided this whole mess. OS X! Great for the creative and criminally minded!
From the article:
In other words, they looked at the files on his computer as evidence. That's been done for
Might they subpoena google in the future? Maybe, but that hasn't happened yet...
The article says "investigators continue to find new evidence on computers seized from Robert Petrick's home", suggesting that this information came from the familiar browser history feature rather than from Google's databases.
Since the defendant was already a suspect, reviewing his browser history is no different than searching his personal papers or anything else in his home.
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
"The Google search was the latest in recently discovered evidence found in the 100 million pages of content removed from computers."
Jesus, how long had this guy been googling for!
when collecting evidence, everything is searched. i mean, they dig in your underwear and in your fridge. of course they will use every information they can get, why should your browser search history be more protected than your underwear? if i did not want to have a search history, i'll clean it. i just don't delete it, i overwrite it with random stuff to really have no search history. my system does this automatically at startup. my data resides on an encrypted partition to which only a special user and root have access, and where i live there is no way for anyone to enforce me to tell my passwords. i actually don't commit any crimes nor is my data worth protecting. i just like to be ahead of them, maybe a nerd issue.
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot. It is a silly place.
Obvious question on this topic and discussion thread: Does Google itself permanently keep at least some of the information associated with Google searches? And if so, what information? Do they keep, for example, the originating IP and any other identifiers?
Allowing police and prosecutors access to one's search history is no different than allowing access to phone records, library checkout lists, or even credit card shopping history. This is all a matter of gaining as much knowledge about a potential suspect to allow the police and prosecutors to move from purely circumstantial to concrete evidence.
That being said, I think it is important for police and prosecutors to realize that one's search history is nothing more than circumstantial evidence, and to arrest a murder suspect because they searched for words like "neck" and "break" deals a sharp blow to the basis of modern day justice.
It does NOT have ANY advantages to use REAL personal data in the internet.
Except at places where you really, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY need it.
People who use REAL personal data in places like Fora, Mailing Lists, or any other thing that could be automatically read by a bot are the naive victims of the internet. That is why spam exists and that is why people who deserve spam exist.
Go, tell this your parents!
The Feds already work with Google to profile users - it's why the Google cookies are set to maximum expiration.
Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches before you've been arrested for a crime
Are you daft?
oh yes it's true and i don't even care if this post is used in the evidence of your ass beating.
Have you ever heard of the term "circumstantial evidence"? Google it. And find:
Circumstantial evidence is a fact that can be used to infer another fact.
In other words- you can't use circumstantial evidence to infer guilt in a crime. Joe Shmoe could "google" the local lake because he's a fisherman.
You have no idea how thankful I am that people with your understanding of legal rights hold no position in the legal system, and how happy I am that most judges are appointed, not elected (well, save the grand state of Texas, among other places) because it's idiots like you who erode the rights of your fellow citizens.
Please help metamoderate.
If information searched for and found on the internet can be directly tied to criminal activities, and is therefore evident of a person's involvement in a crime, then I feel that this isn't anything to be worried about, and nothing new. In past cases library records have been used to help prove the guilt of a suspected criminal. (For example, if any of you watch The New Detectives or any other forensic science shows on television, you may remember a case in which a person had murdered a family member - I think it was a woman who murdered her husband - by using hemlock to fatally poison them. During the investigation, the police acquired the suspect's library record in order to confirm that they had done research into poisons and, more specifically, the hemlock plant itself. If anyone remembers that particular case, I'd appreciate it if you'd fill us all in on that.)
However, if search and library records are used in mere speculation, and don't actually prove anything, but are instead used to paint an unnecessarily ugly picture of a defendant in a trial and damage their character, that's a bit much. It all comes down to how the information is actually used, and whether or not it's being handled in a responsible manner. Furthermore, if search records are used to pin a defendant with lesser crimes, then it has gone beyond the scope of the initial investigation and could be used to unfairly leverage legal power against a suspect in a crime, guilty or not, or even blackmail them into confessing to crimes regardless of whether or not they committed them. ("I won't tell the jury you were looking up hentai if you just fess up." "... Will they even know what that is?" "They will when I'm through with 'em." "OH GOD.") Additionally, if search records are used to preemptively press charges against a person, then it has gone entirely too far. For example, let's say I look up information about radioactive elements and rocketry. Someone could say that I'm planning to construct a rocket-propelled 'dirty bomb', or worse yet, an atomic device, and could then charge me with terrorism. All I'm really doing is gathering information for a research paper on the periodic table while looking up information on rocketry on the side in order to build a model rocket, but nowadays, who's going to believe that?
So, in other words, this isn't anything new. As always, we just need to ensure that the courts are using the information they gather responsibly and in a fair and just manner.
Angela Lansbury aka Jessica Fletcher in Murder she Googled.
There's no need to subpoena Google when you can just get a warrant to search the person's house and effects for evidence. Their "effects" would naturally include their computer, including any information in the browser cache.
Oddly enough, that seems to be exactly what the police did in this situation, based on the article text: "investigators continue to find new evidence on computers seized from Robert Petrick's home". (Okay, I'm kind of assuming they had a warrant, but seeing as how the guy's on trial for murder, I think that particular assumption is pretty safe.)
So, the question for society seems to be, "Should police be able to search the personal effects of people accused of murder, if they have a warrant?" Unsurprisingly, our society came up with an answer to that question over 200 years ago. It's not a very hard question, and our answer was "yes".
The only other question I can see here is "In the modern era, should 'personal effects' be considered to include the contents of someone's computer?" Again, answering "yes" to this one is a no-brainer. I'm a fairly fierce civil libertarian, but I see no problems here: the prosecution had enough evidence to bring a charge of murder against the guy; on the strength of that evidence, they got a warrant to search for more evidence; they're doing so. It all seems quite above-board to me.
Kai MacTane: Web developer for hire in San Francisco
"Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches"
.
Yes, I think police should be able to know everythink and be like God. B.t.w. I'm fucking afraid.
It can be used as evidence against you. For example if a murderer smokes a cigarrette and discards the butt in the trash and a police officer sees him do it. There is no need for probable cause or any of the other legal fancy-shit, since the article was discarded, and was in plain site.
The same should apply to the internet. What you leave here is not private. By definition if it is on the internet it should be considered *public*. Far too often I've run into people who don't want you to look at their "private" webpages even though they are not protected and indeed are searchable on the net! People like this need to take a clue from this trial. If it is on the internet it is public... PERIOD.
GJC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
To make people think twice before murdering? Sounds pretty healthy to me.
I like to live in a country where the judge can gather evidence to resolve a crime. This is called the healthy rule of law, and has nothing to do with the government spying on the citizens, which is very unhealthy. This kind of confusion is really hurting our privacy rights.
No. Of course not, silly you.
While this use of that information makes sense, at what point does your privacy give way to public concerns?
At no point. Of course not, silly buns.
Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches before you've been arrested for a crime,
No. Of course not, silly dearie.
and what effect would this have on the health of society?
None. Of course not, silly silly you.
So here is my question: has there ever in recorded history been a rhetorical question on a /. headline where the answer was not "no, of course not, silly" (or a small variation thereof)?
There are 3 ways I can think of off the top of my head that Google information can become evidence:
1. As in this case, information on what was searched from his own computer
2. Information on what was searched from Google via search warrant.
3. Google the people involved and follow some relevant links.
It should be obvious how one's cyber-life can provide clues, motives, evidence, or even alibis.
-- I Am Not A Terrorist.
100 million pages removed from his computers is simply inexcusable.
That's what subpoenas are for. A prosecutor or investigator has cause. A judge approves. Your privacy gets invaded. Privacy rights don't trump hiding bodies in your basement.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
...in my personal opinion the biggest thing Google could do would be to have a personal preferences section and a "wipe my history" button. When clicked, this action would wipe out all of the data collected on me to date (by my cookie data, gmail data, etc).
That would probably be the single biggest proof that Google truly does stand apart from other all other companies.
I guess you haven't been reading the news like this:
c le/2005/11/05/AR2005110501366.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Use the sponsored links when searching "neck" "snap" "break."
Thanks AdSense!
does anybody else think that this would be a great way to frame somebody?
shanegrant.com
This reminds me of the way Libraries responded to portions of the Patriot Act requiring them to make information about patrons available prior to due process. They simply deleted their databases and stopped keeping track of what people had checked out once items were returned.
If Google wishes to maintain their "good guy" reputation, they could simply update their privacy policy to state that they only store aggregate anonymous information.
I would worry more about the Department of Homeland Security accusing me of being a terrorist if I were to search for things like "Understanding Islam"
Preventing ISP's from keeping this much information is a GOOD thing. This gentleman is still presumed to be innocent by our laws, yet the accumulation of knowledge about a person -- that is not within that person's control -- often leads to an incorrect and dangerous a priori conviction of them in the minds of the public, or the eyes of a jury. Whether it's on his machine or Google's, the point remains the same, and the danger lies in the volume of available information to a subpoena, which can then be cherry picked to suit the prosecutor's particular daily whims. Better hope he had his coffee.
I'd like to clear not just my cache, but Google's, and Yahoo's, and Microsoft's.
In Finland, in a trial of a man that was convicted of the rather brutal murder of his wife and two small children, the suspect's Google searches were used as evidence in the trial. He had searched for information on suicides and various other things. The information did not play a very big role in the trial, but was used as a gauge of his state of mind and used to prove that the deeds were premeditated.
Some say he is made with ascii, others that he is eyeballed daily by millions. All we know is, he is known as the Sig
If he were innocent, he wouldn't have wiped his cache. Keep digging!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
In this case the search queries were gathered from the client's browser history which has nothing to do with Google itself and is perfectly fine imo.
But what if the accused had a Google Personal account and the police convinced Google to hand over the search history? Would there be no privacy at all, since even deleting your browser's cache/history wouldn't delete the one on the Google servers.
Just in the past few days I've done searches on:
Nazi death camps
World War 1
World War 2
Kitchen knives
Assasin weapons (Diablo 2 sent me to jail!)
etc, etc, etc...
Uh oh, someone's knocking on the door. Was nice knowing you.
Police searched his computer. The browser saves recent searches.h tml Google did not hand over anything the browser did.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20051111/1819200_F.s
Get your story right.
The human race is artificial intelligence created using object orientated programming.
You mean you've forgotten about this already???
How many people do harmless furtive stupid things with their computers? How many people would never 'fess up if they did? How many jurors would express shock and horror at things they've maybe done themselves, because they don't want to implicate themselves? I've worked on a lot of other people's computers. It's amazing what you discover without even trying. Just open a file explorer to create a folder to put some files, and you might see all kinds of things. Open the browser, and see what you discover when autocomplete starts filling in your URL's for you.
Computers and the internet make it easier than ever before to secretly screw around. You don't have to go the neighborhood drugstore where everyone knows you to buy your Hustler or whatever. If you've always been curious about how to turn fertilizer into explosives, it's not hard to find out.
None of these things imply that you have a criminal mind, but pretending such behavior is abnormal during a trial plays into arguments about state of mind, etc. Arguments which, were the truth about our collective online behavior known, might not hold much water. "He has a huge lesbian and anal sex porn collection. He has some pirated MP3's. He has a couple shots of bourbon and trolls usenet, picking fights just to amuse himself. He torments people on slashdot with inane poorly written rambling diatribes because, in his words, 'he was bored.' He appears to have an addiction to gory 'first person shooters', and used the online pseudonym 'diefuckers'. This man is clearly deranged, a menace to civilized society."
Except that this man is everyman.
Sort of funny story. I was playing unreal tournament after work one day. Somehow the chat turned to how old everyone was. I had thought I was probably the old guy there (pushing 40), and that I was playing games with a bunch of kids. Turns out at least half the players were around my age.
I think it would be beneficial to society if we could somehow shed our cloak of hypocrisy, and be little more honest about the type of people we really are. Umm, well, yeah right. Hahahahaha. I have to go teach Sunday school now. See ya.
Isn't that akin to not wanting to admit into evidence the security tape of the bomber buying some simple ingredients from the store becuase lots of people buy those same things and it could lead to an incorrect conclusion? He is innocent until proven guilty, it's this and OTHER evidence that will prove him guilty. We're not talking about convicting you because you looked up information on slashing someone's throat, we're talking about convicting you because you don't have an alabi for the time of the murder, you were the last one seen with them, their throat was slashed, your knife was found with their blood on it, AND you looked up information on how to do it. I hate how in this country we demand the most stringent of proof for a case, and yet then turn arround and cry foul whenever police try to gather said proof.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984
Bear in mind too that in murder trials a whole lot hinges on prior intent (i.e. the difference between execution and a few years in prison!) In the article cited, the plaintiff was found to have searched for a variety of information in support of the killing: information on how to kill, information on currents in the body of water where he ditched the body, etc. If I were on a jury, this sort of information would go a long way towards establishing prior intent--that is, this guy didn't just lose it and kill his wife in a fight, but planned it ahead of time.
It also goes to support the basics of the criminal act. I wouldn't vote to convict someone based on their internet searches alone, but when you discover that they sought information in advance on the method of execution used, the method of disposing the body used, and there is other circumstantial evidence to link them to the crime, it sure goes a long way towards eliminating reasonable doubt.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Google Sets will need a little more work before it knows what people are thinking. It's OK for things like "Beatles songs" or "Cambridge colleges", obvious stuff like that, but when I entered the names of half the girlfriends I've had it didn't come out with the other half of the list.
I often search the web for material for my games, using words like names of different weapons, ritual magic, sacrifice, summoning demons, explosives and such - Would this put me under the magnifying glass?
In this case, Google did not provide the information to the police, rather the browser cache did. And yes, when looking for evidence of motive in a murder trial, many things can and should be admissable, provided they are legally seized via a search warrant. This isn't a music company fishing for copyright violations, this is a man who murdered his wife.
If he had left notes on stickies somewhere about how to hide a body in a lake, it would be no different from this. If he hadn't wanted anybody to know what he searched on he could easily have configured his browser to delete all history.
Unbreakable toys can be used to break other toys.
Are they printing on post-it notes or what?
Or did some reporter just Google a Kb to printed-page-equivalent conversion? 'Cause I doubt they're going to find much useful information in the .dll libraries and executables...
The article isn't very technical, but it suggests that the evidence was obtained from the suspect's computer, not from Google itself. In other words, they looked at his browser cache. I doubt Google keeps logs of every search -- at least, not for very long.
From implementing some form of 'thought police'.
Just look for patterns in search habits, then go collect the offenders for questioning.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
What? The article you put up is (to me) a clear abuse. What does that have to do with a proper murder investigation? Suspects have always been searched and few people have a problem with that. Searching innocent people to look for suspects is a whole different thing. You know, apples and oranges. The only thing related between these two articles is that they involve police searches: one proper and one an abuse. Just becuase there has been one illegal search doesn't make every search bad.
Slashdotters know that systems are too easily compromised, bytes on a harddrive too easily planted, and tracks too easily erased for this to be used as evidence in a capital crime. A good defense attorney should be able to blast holes in this via "reasonable doubt."
Unfortunately, unless the Judge knows enough to block this outright, the jury will hear it. And they, nontechnical as they are, will probably lean towards this as being a smoking gun. This is how the DAs use computer forensics like this as a shortcut to "justice." Just as bad, they can sometimes coerce or fool someone into confessing when that person's attorney (or lack of one at the time) doesn't know enough to say, "that's not reasonable evidence; don't respond to it."
It sure would be nice if the people who pass laws in this country would take some time out of their schedule to pass legislation that addresses this kind of "evidence." It shouldn't be admissible.
Relying on Computer, U.S. Seeks to Prove Iran's Nuclear Aims"
Yes, that's right. The same government that'd believe the bytes on a harddrive somewhere "prove" somebody searched for something on Google, also would trust the contents of a hard drive containing "intelligence" on Iran.
Right now, the US is trying to build a case against Iran armed with a "stolen" hard drive. Sure, Mossad could have just cooked up the same data, but hey -- it's on a computer right? It's gotta be true.
It's just like those TV ads where the graph shows "3 out of 4 dentists blah blah"... hey, it's a graph on a computer; on TV; it's gotta be true?!?
God help us.
Libraries never have kept information of what you had checked out once it is returned (unlike Amazon that has a record of all your purchases). I've been working with library circulation systems for thirty years, and ALWAYS there is an RFP requirement that "the system shall not keep a record after the item is returned. The link between patron and item must be broken..."
(Full disclosure statement: Patron history is allowed and kept for so-called "Outreach patrons" who enjoy a personalized level of library service because they are homebound. They tend to be elderly and forgetful, and they tend to read genres like romances or westerns. They also are voracious readers who can easily 'read out' a collection. This "patron history" allows their caregiver to avoid giving them the same book on the very next visit. They just wait a couople and then maybe they won't remember anyway.)
During the last fit of hysteria over the Patriot Act our Board of Trustees even wanted to know the precise backup policy and suggested we keep FEWER BACKUPS! Yes, it is possible to restore the system state to four months ago and read what people had checked out then, but only if you disrupted a 24/7 system for a couple of days to do it. Beyond that it is pretty much impossible because the tapes get written over (Our variation on father/grandfather is Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri-1, Fri-2, Fri-3, Fri-4, Fri-5 to accommodate five-Friday months. The most you can stretch is about 4 months with this scheme. The dailies are written over in 7 days. The Fri-1-Fri-4 are written over the next month, and the Fri-5 is written over the next month that has five Fridays). Fortunately reason prevailed and they didn't mess with my backups.
The tapes themselves are not going to help the cops. It's not as if the information is linear on the tapes. Library databases are incredibly complex with multiple tables, layers, and pointers. The information on the tapes is useless unless it is run through the programs themselves in exactly the right manner on a machine configured EXACTLY like the one it came off of (in terms of rev levels of the programs, config options, etc.)
I'd be perfectly happy giving the FBI or the NSA or whomever a full backup copy from my database. It would cost them about a million dollars and several months just to get to the point of making sense out of it, assuming they hired the right people to put it all back together.
The only practical way for an 'authority' to go back in time on check outs is to subpoena the library and force them to do it, in which case it would be national news in 24 hours. It would be easy to check on what you have checked out right now, and for that all you need is a subpoena.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
From another newspaper account of the trial, quoting his former court-appointed attorney...
"Edwards and local television journalist Julia Lewis of WRAL said Petrick apparently supported himself by running a computer business. Lewis said he seemed to know a lot about Linux and operating systems."
Obviously a very dangerous man, folks. I mean, he could even be one of those Open Source radicals or something. Won't somebody think of the children!!!
Yes, it's sarcasm...I promise I won't indulge in again.
"dynomite", "hole", "blast", "ass", "trick", "slashdot", "pleasure", "bigger", "troll"
Table-ized A.I.
I suppose you use postcards for all your snail mail correspondence?
Or, you can just let law enforcement do it for you. I mean, if they actually did that anymore, of course - except as a joke. After all, the (tosse!)evolution(tosse!) of legislation is turning that into a thing of the past.
And soon, all that will be needed shall be for a program (like the MIT music preferences program, in a more recent article) to correlate your searches with your credit rating, school history, blogs, orkut ratings, the kind of photos you appear in (another recent article) and other datum - and decide that you're probably going to commit a crime. Connecting to slashdot more than twice, of course.... but then, you already knew that, right ?
Premier Executive Transport Services! Non-Stop First-Class flights to anywhere in the world.
We noticed your Google searches, and we're here to give you a free flight to Egypt, on us.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
"While this use of that information makes sense, at what point does your privacy give way to public concerns?"
gee i don't know...how about during a murder trial...nothing to see here folks this is a just use of due process.
idiot
Sounds like an excellent title for Tom Cruise Movie!
http://www.mindpixel.com/chris/2005/07/ai-predicts -terror-attacks.html
At 16:54 on July 11, 2005 a GAC-80K based artificial intelligence program I wrote, only five days old and built out of data contributed over the past five years by more than 50,000 Internet users, extracted the semantic spectrum of a highly suspicious google query originating from Ankara, Turkey. The query related to gas stations near buildings.
A public Mindpixel Terrorism Advisory [also posted to usenet] was issued on the same day and the FBI, RCMP and Interpol were notified of the potential threat and given details of the exact origin of the suspicious query on July 12th. Five days after the detection, on July 16, two attacks occurred. One in Turkey, and one at a gas station near a mosque and an apartment in Iraq.
Hell, I've done searches on the old "26 ways to kill a person" howto.
;-)
That's nothing. Yesterday I searched for the legal definition of "genocide". No shit, eh, but I guess I'm in deep shit now
FYI no need to contact google for a forensic computing tech like me to see what you've been googling for.
All your Google, Yahoo, and other searches are easily found in your index.dat file (in or below your temp internet folder if you are using IE).
I just have to run a quick grep and unless you've deleted and then over-written your index.dat file it's all there for me to seize in plain text... Usualy takes about a minute and a half...
Unless you have a computer that is physically off-limits to anyone else in the world, I don't see how this can easily be proven. Even if I logged into to some account, that doesn't prove I was there doing it. For example, my browser remembers my name and password for several accounts. Anyone else could sit down and my computer and log into those accounts.
So, whose to say someone isn't trying to frame me by entering my home and using my computer to make 'questionable' searches? For that matter, who's to say someone couldn't have remoted in to my computer and performed those searches.
The police don't subpoena people, prosecutors do. And why subpoena someone when you can just search Google, a public search engine of public data they don't control? I'm as suspicious of the police state and government privacy invasion as the next paranoid, but this question is really stupid, and gives paranoia a bad name.
--
make install -not war
Anything done in public (ie: posting to a public web site) is usable as evidence. If you don't like it, then maybe you should stay off the public airways with your comments.
http://www.google-watch.org/
Herman Cassiday - if you read this, send me an email and let me know how you've been all these years. ;-)
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
I vow to no longer use Google anymore, now that I know they capture everything I do.
Uh... wait a minute... the internet - without Google... hmm.
Um. Forget it.
Wired Article
I guess you still might be, but you're a complete kook at least. This looks like a really interesting project, which fellow-slashdotters would probably be interested in.
Cheers, R.
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\TypedURLs
It's not that they're stupid. They're simply unaware of how the Internet works.
Actually, it is quite stupid. Not knowing how the Internet works is simply ignorance, and is easily fixed. The stupid part is posting sensitive personal information in a medium you don't understand.
Are you sure they just didn't read the browser cache on the computer?
Seams a lot easier.
> "Well, the details are a bit scant, but it seems that the content of Google searches were used to help establish intent in a murder trial.
Great!
> Will police in the future simply serve a subpoena to Google to find out what you've been thinking about?
Maybe
> While this use of that information makes sense,
Excellent. Good thinking.
> at what point does your privacy give way to public concerns?
At the point it needs to be inspected to establish intent to a crime.
> Should police be able to search through your search history for
> "questionable" searches before you've been arrested for a crime,
Yes. Inspecting questionable online activity *before* an arrest is what they do with online paedophiles, remember?
> and what effect would this have on the health of society?"
A good one.
While i'm sure you're right about google logging IP addresses with search requests, this can only be useful if the user's got a static IP address... so use an anonymous proxy if you're searching for anything controversial and you've got a broadband connection. If one is using the Google search toolbar... they probably *do* have everything. The answer for that is sort of obvious.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Soon to be launched, gTIA.google.com Google Total Information Awareness. (LEO only)
gTIA will allow you to patrol your electronic beat. Let your fingers do the walking TM.
Now you can subscribe to searches relevant to crimes in your area. Thanks to our revolutionary tracking technology, we'll deliver names and adresses of suspects searching for, murder, rape, mutilation, or any other mortal sin. Thanks to our mapping technology you can even plot their locations in real time.
We'll soon launch OptiPickup where you can plan the best route for your vehicles to pick up the perpetrators. We'll even have the booking forms as downloadble pdfs, prefilled with the relevant sections of US law. And your DA will enjoy our custom google books, which will have previous case law in his inbox by the time you're back at the precinct.
who is to say that someone didn't use their computer to frame them? I think it's kind of irrelevant. Unless maybe you have a conviction of kiddie porn..
http://www.queenmichelle.com
Your honor and members of the Jury the defendant is guilty of one thing and one thing only, he chose to use a horribly insecure operating system
and has been framed; Unbeknownst to him some neck breaking homicidal script kiddies compromised his system and began searching google
for the means and method to kill and dispose of a body using a lake. Using this information along with his schedule (outlook) and his preferred billing address (microsoft passport) they planned and successfully carried out the senseless random murder of his beloved wife..............
or even simpler; google made him do it.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.